Ph D abstract - Aleksandra Tesanovic

Developing Reusable and Reconfigurable Real-Time Software using
Aspects and Components

Our main focus in this thesis is on providing guidelines, methods,
and tools
for design, configuration, and analysis of configurable and reusable
real-time software, developed using a combination of aspect-oriented and
component-based software development. Specifically, we define a
reconfigurable real-time component model (RTCOM) that describes how a
real-time component, supporting aspects and enforcing information
hiding,
could efficiently be designed and implemented. In this context, we
outline
design guidelines for development of real-time systems using components
and
aspects, thereby facilitating static configuration of the system, which
is
preferred for hard real-time systems. For soft real-time systems with
high
availability requirements we provide a method for dynamic system
reconfiguration that is especially suited for resource-constrained
real-time
systems and it ensures that components and aspects can be added,
removed, or
exchanged in a system at run-time. Satisfaction of real-time
constraints is
essential in the real-time domain and, for real-time systems built of
aspects and components, analysis is ensured by: (i) a method for
aspect-level worst-case execution time analysis; (ii) a method for
formal
verification of temporal properties of reconfigurable real-time
components;
and (iii) a method for maintaining quality of service, i.e., the
specified
level of performance, during normal system operation and after dynamic
reconfiguration.

We have implemented a tool set with which the designer can efficiently
configure a real-time system to meet functional requirements and
analyze it
to ensure that non-functional requirements in terms of temporal
constraints
and available memory are satisfied.

In this thesis we present a proof-of-concept implementation of a
configurable embedded real-time database, called COMET. The
implementation
illustrates how our methods and tools can be applied, and demonstrates
that
the proposed solutions have a positive impact in facilitating efficient
development of families of real-time systems.